Brooklyn Museum Revamps African Art Galleries, Aiming for Nuance Over Stereotype

The Brooklyn Museum’s renewed focus on African art is a telling barometer of changing attitudes in both the city and the wider art world.

A black basalt reliquary, carved in Gabon and exported—some would say expropriated—by Europeans in the 19th century, sits quietly in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. For years it has languished in a distant hall, overlooked by all but the most determined. This is set to change. The museum recently announced an ambitious plan to create new galleries dedicated to its Arts of Africa collection, aiming to recast both the presentation and perception of a continent too often defined by others.

With an eye toward 2025, museum officials intend to unite disparate holdings spanning hundreds of cultures and centuries. Anne Pasternak, the museum’s director, says the goal is to ensure New Yorkers of African descent—and, conceivably, all visitors—see their “cultures represented with dignity.” The overhaul will increase the gallery’s footprint, update didactics to reflect current research, and foreground African voices in curation.

At first glance, another gallery refurbishment may seem parochial. Yet for New York City, whose population includes over 2 million Black residents and a significant African diaspora, the revamp portends more than cultural window-dressing. It is an attempt to recalibrate the city’s stance on museums’ complicated colonial inheritance. In effect, Brooklyn’s gesture is both symbolic and practical: a conscious bid to redress the ways African art has been marginalized in American institutions.

The first-order effect is that untold thousands of New Yorkers will encounter African art not as a foil for Western mastery, but as a complex, self-sufficient tradition. For teachers, family groups, and tourists alike, the space may offer a rare opportunity: to see Benin bronzes, Yoruba beadwork, or a Fang mask in a context that answers to African rather than European priorities. The redesign promises not just new cases and captions, but also a rotating advisory group drawn from African and diasporic communities.

There are, however, subtler ripples. As museums on both sides of the Atlantic grapple with provenance and repatriation, Brooklyn’s initiative signals a willingness to confront uncomfortable legacies. The economic implications, while less bracing, are not trivial. Enhanced galleries may attract fresh donors—a crucial consideration as the museum’s $53m annual budget remains under perennial pressure. City politicians, for their part, may revel in the optics of a project that aligns with broader equity rhetoric.

The museum’s gambit bodes well for the diversification of curatorial staff and programming across the city’s other cultural mainstays, from the Met to the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the background looms a larger reckoning over who “owns” world art and how museums justify acquisitions made by collectors and colonial agents alike. The Brooklyn Museum’s move is, in its way, an experiment: can a reimagined gallery change visitors’ assumptions, or merely reinforce the city’s self-congratulatory pluralism?

A gallery’s politics, a continent’s story

Broader comparisons show New York is hardly alone in this process of museological reappraisal. London’s British Museum, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, and Paris’s Musée du quai Branly have variously staged exhibitions, mustered committees, and—sometimes grudgingly—returned contested artifacts. Yet the American museum scene, less entangled in imperial nostalgia, may prove nimbler. Authentically African perspectives remain underrepresented both in collections and decision-making. As of last year, only a handful of US museums had more than one African curator on staff.

For New York’s cultural sector, whose competitiveness hinges on international reputation, the implications are not merely academic. More inclusive galleries may enhance the city’s ability to attract tourists post-pandemic, burnishing its claim as the United States’ cultural capital. Businesses in Brooklyn’s revitalising neighborhoods might enjoy a modest uptick—if not quite a bonanza—from increased foot traffic. Even more quietly, the project may catalyze overdue inventory: how many objects with tangled histories still sit uncatalogued in storage?

On a societal level, the gallery project enters a fraught conversation about historical memory. Will the shiny new spaces generate harder questions about restitution, or temper calls for New York to return its own contested holdings? Some will suspect window-dressing, others a genuine cultural polity shift. Data from previous Brooklyn Museum investments—such as the reimagined American Art and Asian Art wings—suggest that raising gallery quality often leads to a slow but palpable shift in public narratives.

Ultimately, the Brooklyn Museum’s effort offers a cautiously optimistic model of institutional change. Critics will question whether new labels and a larger gift shop can compensate for deep-rooted inequalities in collection and governance. Yet, if the project prompts even a fraction of visitors to think less parochially about art’s origins and ownership, it will have achieved something rarely accomplished in New York: moving the conversation, however incrementally, in the right direction. ■